Wall Street shares opened sharply down on Wednesday after weaker-than-expected results overnight from Intel and Yahoo, and a plunge on Tokyo's Nikkei. The Tokyo exchange had to close 20 minutes early as a rush of selling following allegations of fraud at a firm threatened a system meltdown. Both this and the failure of Intel and Yahoo to meet profit expectations had a knock-on effect on European exchanges. In opening US trade, the main Dow Jones index was down 35 points to 10,861. The technology-heavy Nasdaq fell 36 points to 2,267, while the Standard & Poor's 500 had given up six points to 1,277. "It's going to start bad [Wednesday trading in New York], but the key is how the market finishes," said analyst John Hughes, managing director at Epiphany Equity Research. ... http://news.bbc.co.uk

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has the confirmation vote of at least one Senate Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who praised Alito as a man of “impeccable judicial credentials.”The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote next Tuesday on Alito’s nomination to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who often casts the swing vote on controversial cases. Senate Democrats were meeting Wednesday to discuss the nomination.Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., announced before the meeting that she will vote against Alito. “I have a lot of unanswered questions,” Mikulski told reporters after attending the swearing-in of new Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J....http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10907987/from/RSS/

Doctors are investigating if the bird flu virus was responsible for the death of a 15-year-old girl in Kurdistan near the border with Turkey and Iran, an Iraqi Health Ministry official said Wednesday. The girl died Tuesday after contracting a severe lung infection in her home town of Raniya, just north of a reservoir that's a stopover for migratory birds from Turkey, the site of a recent bird flu outbreak. Kurdish officials have begun to burn and bury dead birds, as well as kill any migratory birds they capture, said Kurdistan Health Minister Mohammed Khoshnow. The girl's family apparently kept chickens in their house and some of those birds also died, said Dr. Abdul Jalil Naji. Raniya is about 60 miles south of the Turkish border and just 15 miles west of Iran. ...http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1517848

The Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein was thrown into fresh confusion on Wednesday when a senior official denounced the new chief judge as a member of Saddam's banned Baath party who should be barred from office."(Sayeed) al-Hamashi is the object of a debaathification inquiry," Ali Faisal, executive manager of the independent Debaathification Commission, told Reuters. "His presence in this court violates the statutes … and he must be replaced." He said Hamashi's position at the court only came to the Commission's notice when he was named by tribunal officials as taking over after the previous chief judge resigned last week....http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1517846

STMicroelectronics is planning to market a disposable laboratory microchip that can confirm within about an hour a human case of bird flu at a limited cost, the European chip maker said on Wednesday. The Franco-Italian group is developing a test that could be available to healthcare providers this autumn with Singapore-based medical diagnostics company Veredus Laboratories Pte Ltd. "To be available in time for the next flu season, the single-test application will be a substantial breakthrough in enabling rapid identification of the infectious agent to limit the spread of the disease and speed patients' treatment," STMicro said in a statement. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1517883

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a lower court was wrong to strike down New Hampshire abortion restrictions, steering clear of a major ruling on whether such laws place an undue burden on women. The opinion (.pdf) was written by retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a key swing voter at the court on abortion rights. Justices said a lower court went too far by permanently blocking the law that requires a parent to be told before a daughter ends her pregnancy. An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth's health. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/18/supremecourt/main1217567.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=U.S._1217567